China runs. The growing industrialization of patents in China has accelerated the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) active in this field. The confirmation came from the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). The numbers speak for themselves: as stated by spokesperson Liang Xinxin, in November the percentage of nationally valid invention patents held by businesses was 73.5 percent, many of which were owned by SMEs.
Of the valid invention patents held by SMEs in China in 2024, 75.3 percent are for independently developed inventions, an increase of 3.9 percent from 2023. The industrialization rate of invention patents assets held by SMEs in the country reached 55.1 percent, an increase of 3.6 percentage points compared to last year, Liang added. Wang Peizhang, senior official of the CNIPA, remarked that the administration is promoting technological integration between SMEs, universities and research institutes, with the aim of accelerating the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises through the commercialization of patents .
One of the fields in which China has filed the most patents is that of quantum technologies and there is no shortage of important updates on this front. Beijing has in fact overtaken Google in the race for quantum supremacy: the “Zuchongzhi 3.0” processor, with 105 qubits (the information unit at the basis of quantum computers, ed.), is the most advanced quantum computing machine in the world. An extraordinary result that surpasses Google’s 72-qubit “Sycamore” processor, released last October, by six orders of magnitude.
Suffice it to say that the powerful Chinese machine solved the complex operation in a few seconds, while the current world leader in supercomputing – Frontier – would have needed about six billion years. A new milestone that demonstrates China’s ability to excel in a field that will revolutionize information technology. But not only that.
Today these systems are only capable of solving theoretical problems, but the researchers believe that this work opens interesting avenues to explore how increasing the number of qubits and the complexity of circuits can help tackle real-world problems more efficiently .